Article:

Alexa, optimier mich! KI-Fiktionen digitaler Assistenzsysteme in der Werbung

This paper regards the marketing of virtual assistance systems as a cultural repository of discourses, values, and norms. Since the assistance systems Siri, Alexa, Cortana, etc. hardly differ from each other in their practical value, advertising campaigns have to link specific semantic values to the individual products. In the following, this linking is analyzed based on the topics of «power» and «gender» that have already been established in the usage situation of AI assistants. This reveals different strategies for personalizing and intimizing the relationships between people and digital counterparts, which ultimately refers to a networked field of cultural references—from science fiction films, for example—in the thematic field of the autonomous machine.